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Nagios Core Administration Cookbook Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Tom Ryder

5 (2)

Nagios Core Administration Cookbook Second Edition

5 (2)

By: Tom Ryder

Overview of this book

Nagios Core is an open source monitoring framework suitable for any network that ensures both internal and customer-facing services are running correctly and manages notification and reporting behavior to diagnose and fix outages promptly. It allows very fine configuration of exactly when, where, what, and how to check network services to meet both the uptime goals of your network and systems team and the needs of your users. This book shows system and network administrators how to use Nagios Core to its fullest as a monitoring framework for checks on any kind of network services, from the smallest home network to much larger production multi-site services. You will discover that Nagios Core is capable of doing much more than pinging a host or to see whether websites respond. The recipes in this book will demonstrate how to leverage Nagios Core's advanced configuration, scripting hooks, reports, data retrieval, and extensibility to integrate it with your existing systems, and to make it the rock-solid center of your network monitoring world.

Preface

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Sections

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

1. Understanding Hosts, Services, and Contacts

1. Understanding Hosts, Services, and Contacts

Introduction

Creating a new network host

Creating a new HTTP service

Creating a new e-mail contact

Verifying configuration

Creating a new hostgroup

Creating a new servicegroup

Creating a new contactgroup

Creating a new time period

Running a service on all hosts on a group

2. Working with Commands and Plugins

2. Working with Commands and Plugins

Introduction

Finding a plugin

Installing a plugin

Removing a plugin

Creating a new command

Customizing an existing command

Using an alternative check command for hosts

Writing a new plugin from scratch

Implementing threshold checks in a plugin

Using macros as environment variables in a plugin

3. Working with Checks and States

3. Working with Checks and States

Introduction

Specifying how frequently to check a host or service

Changing thresholds for PING RTT and packet loss

Changing thresholds for disk usage

Scheduling downtime for a host or service

Managing brief outages with flapping

Adjusting flapping percentage thresholds for a service

4. Configuring Notifications

4. Configuring Notifications

Introduction

Configuring notification periods

Configuring notifications for groups

Choosing states for notification

Specifying the number of failed checks before notification

Automating contact rotation

Defining an escalation for repeated notifications

Defining a custom notification method

Filtering notifications based on a host or service value

5. Monitoring Methods

5. Monitoring Methods

Introduction

Monitoring PING for any host

Monitoring SSH for any host

Checking an alternative SSH port

Monitoring mail services

Monitoring web services

Checking that a website returns a given string

Monitoring database services

Monitoring the output of an SNMP query

Monitoring a RAID or other hardware device

Creating an SNMP OID for monitoring

6. Enabling Remote Execution

6. Enabling Remote Execution

Introduction

Monitoring local services on a remote machine with NRPE

Setting the listening address for NRPE

Setting allowed client hosts for NRPE

Creating new NRPE command definitions securely

Giving limited sudo(8) privileges to NRPE

Using check_by_ssh with key authentication instead of NRPE

Using check_mk instead of NRPE

7. Using the Web Interface

7. Using the Web Interface

Introduction

Using the Tactical Overview

Viewing and interpreting availability reports

Viewing and interpreting trends

Viewing and interpreting notification history

Adding comments on hosts or services in the web interface

Viewing configuration in the web interface

Scheduling checks from the web interface

Acknowledging a problem via the web interface

8. Managing Network Layout

8. Managing Network Layout

Introduction

Creating a network host hierarchy

Using the network map

Choosing icons for hosts

Establishing a host dependency

Establishing a service dependency

Monitoring individual nodes in a cluster

Using the network map as an overlay

9. Managing Configuration

9. Managing Configuration

Introduction

Grouping configuration files in directories

Keeping a configuration under version control

Configuring host roles using groups

Building groups using regular expressions

Using inheritance to simplify configuration

Defining macros in a resource file

Using another object's directives in a host or service check

Using custom directives

Dynamically building host definitions

10. Security and Performance

10. Security and Performance

Introduction

Using authentication for the Nagios Core web interface

Using authenticated contacts

Writing debugging information to the Nagios log file

Monitoring Nagios performance with nagiostats

Setting up a redundant monitoring host

11. Automating and Extending Nagios Core

11. Automating and Extending Nagios Core

Introduction

Allowing and submitting passive checks

Submitting passive checks from a remote host with NSCA

Submitting passive checks in response to SNMP traps

Setting up an event handler script

Tracking host and service states with Nagiosgraph

Reading status in a MySQL database with NDOUtils

Reading status from a Unix socket with MK Livestatus

Writing customized Nagios Core reports

Getting extra visualizations with NagVis

Writing custom Nagios Core management scripts

Index

Index

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Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, and user input are shown as follows: "Nagios Core will only need whatever information the ping(8) tool would need for its own check_ping command."

A block of code is set as follows:

define service {
    use                  generic-service
    host_name            sparta.example.net
    service_description  HTTP
    check_command        check_http
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

define host {
    host_name              sparta.example.net
    alias                  sparta
    address                192.0.2.21
    max_check_attempts     3
    check_period           24x7
    check_command          check-host-alive
    contacts               nagiosadmin
    notification_interval  60
    notification_period    24x7
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

# cd /usr/local/nagios/etc/objects
# vi sparta.example.net.cfg

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "If the server restarted successfully, the web interface should show a brand new host in the Hosts list, in the PENDING state as it waits to run a check that the host is alive."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Visually different images

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